Delete Your Account

This page explains how to close your BauBau account and exactly what happens to yourdata. There are two different options — deactivate and delete — and they are not the same thing.

1. Deactivate or delete?

Deactivate puts your account to sleep. Nothing is erased: your dogs, encounters, notes, and history stay exactly as you left them, and you can reactivate and pick up where you stopped at any time. Choose this if you just want to step away for a while. Your subscription keeps running while you’re deactivated, so cancel it separately from the billing portal or your app store if you don’t want to keep paying.

Delete is permanent and cannot be undone. It is a real erasure: the information that identifies you and your household is destroyed, and the records that remain are stripped of the details that tie them to you (see sections 5, 6, and 7 for what is removed, what is kept, and how long full anonymisation takes). Choose this only if you are sure you won’t want your data back.

2. Delete from the BauBau mobile app (dog owners)

The fastest way to delete a dog-owner account is from inside the BauBau app:

• Open the BauBau app on your phone.
• Tap the Settings tab.
• Scroll to the bottom of the screen and tap Delete Account.
• Confirm twice when prompted. This is intentional — deletion cannot be undone.

As soon as you confirm, your account is permanently deleted and you are signed out. This is different from deactivating (section 1), which leaves your data intact.

3. Delete from the behaviourist portal

Behaviourists can delete their own account from the portal:

• Sign in and open Settings.
• In the Danger zone, choose Delete account.
• Type DELETE to confirm, then choose Delete account again. Deletion cannot be undone.

If you sponsor Pro for any of your clients, that sponsored Pro continues for a 7-day grace period after you delete, then ends.

If you only want to step away for a while, choose Deactivate account instead, in the same Danger zone — it is reversible and erases nothing (see section 1). Can’t sign in? See section 4.

4. Don’t have access to your account?

If you can’t sign in (for example, you lost your phone or forgot your password), email us and we will verify your identity and delete the account for you:

• Email: support@bau-bau.app
• Subject: “Delete my BauBau account”
• Include: the email address on the account, and the name of any dogs or clients you have in the app.

We respond to deletion requests within 5 business days.

5. What gets deleted

When you delete your account we destroy the information that identifies you and your household. This is gone for good and cannot be recovered:

• Your identity — your email address, name, and (for behaviourists) practice name and address, and your sign-in record.
• Your dogs’ names and photos, and any photos you uploaded.
• Everything you wrote in your own words — the free-text notes on your encounters, daily logs, and interventions, and any voice notes.
• Location data — the places where encounters were recorded.
• Behaviourists’ clinical notes about your household — when a dog owner deletes, the session notes a behaviourist wrote about their dogs are destroyed too.

6. What we keep, anonymised, and why

Once the identifying information above is destroyed, we strip the names, contact details, photos, free text, and location from the records that remain, so that on their own they no longer identify you or your dog. We keep that de-identified remainder so we can understand how dog reactivity changes over time across everyone who uses BauBau:

• The shape of the record, with the names removed — reaction levels, trigger types, distances, the dog’s response, timestamps, the before/after outcome of each encounter, breed, and stress-alert history. These carry no name, email, photo, free text, or location once deletion is complete.
• Subscription state — whether the account was Free or Pro, kept as an anonymous statistic, not tied to a person.

Separately, a small amount of data is retained because we are legally required to keep it:

• Billing and payment records — subscription and payment history, including the transaction logs from our payment processors (Stripe and RevenueCat), is retained to meet tax and accounting obligations. These records can contain identifiers such as your email address until they age out of our standard retention windows.
• Fraud and abuse signals — if your account was suspended for a policy violation, we may retain a minimal record to enforce the suspension.

Because of those legally-required records — and because our routine backups and system logs still hold recent data for a while (see section 7) — some information that could identify you continues to exist for a limited period after you delete. The de-identified remainder described above becomes fully anonymous only once all of it has aged out. We never use these retained records to re-link that remainder back to you.

7. Timing

Deletion is immediate from your perspective — you are signed out and cannot sign back in, and the identifying information in section 5 is destroyed at that point. A few traces take longer to clear: recent data lingers in our routine database backups and system logs, and in the legally-required billing records described in section 6, until each ages out on its normal rotation schedule. We cannot reach into an individual backup or log to erase a single account ahead of that schedule, so full erasure completes once the last of those has rotated out.

8. Can I recover a deleted account?

No. Deletion is permanent. If you want to use BauBau again after deleting, you will need to create a new account and start from scratch — there is nothing to restore. (If you only wanted a break, deactivating instead of deleting keeps everything; see section 1.)

9. Questions

If you have any questions about deletion or about what data we hold, contact us at support@bau-bau.app.